June 21st, 2012-Rain is a good thing.

Things were getting pretty interesting in the last week with a severe deficit of moisture in most of our fields.  Corn last Saturday already was starting to roll on headlands or on lighter soils.  We were lucky enough to get relief last night as we got 2-3 inches of rain across most of our ground and it was just in time.  Hopefully it came in time as the corn was/is going through some pretty critical stages right now with kernal/row establishment.  Soybeans should really respond as many fields look like they were sitting still waiting for moisture.  It's great to get the rain but I feel for the folks in the eastern corn belt who are really taking it in the shorts this year. 

I'm happy with our crops are looking but not as happy as I was a few weeks back.  I really thought that with the drought stress that we'd see some separation from a moisture conservation standpoint on the strips but haven't really observed too much.  It seems also that the corn has slightly stalled before this rain which may be a function of the roots hitting the sides or bottoms of the strip and struggling to penetrate the denser layer of soil.  I've also thought that with the dry conditions, the salt load in the zone from the banded fertilizer may be actually hurting us rather than helping.  Hopefully with the rain those concerns will be a moot point and things take off. 

Dad and I resumed field work on Father's Day as we were out of commission most of last week with my Grandmother's funeral.  We sprayed a chunk of my soybean farm but was forced to quit from the winds that picked up in the afternoon.  I had a lot of volunteer corn to contend with as the down corn from last fall combined with my aggressive trash whippers throwing a lot of dirt and covering equated to a lot of corn up.  We did have some lambsquarter in a few patches that came back from our burndown application that had some pretty good size that we had to get.  I hope that the herbicide works as the weeds were likely not too actively growing with the heat we had.  I'm hoping to come back next week on my farm and burn the beans and any remaining weeds with Cobra.  A lot of people don't like burning beans but there's been a fair amount of work done that shows that stressing the beans at the right time with the active in Cobra can have several benefits including induced systemic resistance to pathogens like white mold as well as encouraging branching of beans and shortening of internodes.  Dad thinks I'm nuts again doing this but that seems to be a common theme this year.  So far so good so we'll keep riding the lightning til we get burned.  Here's a shot of what the beans look like before burning.

I was able to get my inter crop plot side dressed last Sunday as the corn was getting pretty big. I waited til the heat of the day and drove slow to avoid snapping off the big corn.  I applied my V pattern of UAN and ammonium thiosulfate so that my outside rows now have around 250 lbs of nitrogen and the inside rows have about 180 total lbs of nitrogen along with some sulfur as well.  I'm disappointed with how many runt plants I have in my outside rows with the high population.  I'm guessing by harvest i'll only have 42-45k harvestable ears/A which will likely decrease the benefit of intercrop vs my check.  My check strip looks phenomenal to this point so I'm worried a little bit for now about the comparison this fall.  The intercrop strips of corn have a dome shaped canopy affect where the outside rows are noticeably shorter than the middle rows which are competing more for light.  The strips of corn look OK but not as even as they were a few weeks ago. 

I spent quite a bit of time this last week hoeing the volunteer RR corn in my 1 acre of soybean strips between the corn.. Some folks go to the lake on Saturday's, I go to my to intercrop to swing a hoe.    Here's some pictures of before and after and how I spent my Saturday afternoon.  It felt good when I was all done.  Nothing better than wiping out Monsanto Mushrooms.

I also sprayed the intercrop beans this week and had Dad shoot some live action of the Geisha in action spraying some glyphosate.  For those of you who own JD 4930's or Hagie STS 16's , we're coming for you.  

Hope everyone has a good week and gets some rain!!!

June 10, 2012

This week the crops really took off with the heat and are now in need of a rain pretty badly as I saw some fields starting to curl on the way home this afternoon from my youngest daughters birthday party.  Our corn has reached the V7-V8 stage on our planting dates of April 25-27th and our May 4th-5th  dates are at V5-V6.  Our soybeans really took off this week and have 2 sets of trifoliates on them and look great minus a few spots of iron chlorosis on high pH spots that started to show this week.  I hope that the rain called for tonight materializes as things will start to go backward this week without any. 

I spent several nights this week driving around the countryside looking at crops and in general, most crops look awfully good in our local area.  I can't remember a summer when all of the corn had good color this time of the year.  You have to look hard to find a field that appears to be short of nutrients or other problems.  I attribute this a lot to the fact the natural breakdown of organic matter and other nutrient cycling through microbial sources was likely sped up due to the early start of the growing season in March.  This has made lots of nutrients available quicker than years with colder starts when mineralization and microbial action is slower. 

It's interesting looking at fields that were planted this spring in really dry conditions early and still being able to see field cultivator tracks and sweeps at an angle across many fields.  You can see the pattern and the difference in plant height quite clearly on fields effected.  I wish I had more time to try to quantify these patterns and how substantial comes to yield in the fall.  It's nice not having those patterns in our fields where we stripped.  We'd have them previous years in our fields and they always drove my Dad and I nuts looking at them.

We'll finish spraying our last field of corn tomorrow and then switch right over to soybeans and spray my farm as our sprayer had a few problems making the burndown application a few weeks back and have scattered spots where the lambsquarter weren't completely knocked down.  My extra aggressive setting of my trash whippers when I planted appears to have been a mistake.  It looks like I planted a lot of volunteer corn by throwing so much dirt and covering up corn laying on the surface.  My farm has quite a bit more coming than Dad's soybeans where we used the bigger planter and didn't have the whippers so aggressive.  Live and learn, I guess.  I was hoping to wait and spray 2 weeks later than this but I won't be able to tolerate looking at the field for another 2 weeks with the volunteer corn coming and other sprayer misses. 

Our strip inter crop trial is really taking off now that we have some nitrogen on it and I'll likely have to do my 2nd side dress pass this week before the corn shades the row.  The biggest issue I have in the inter crop to contend with is the amount of volunteer corn coming in the soybeans.  What's ironic is that most of last years corn planted on this field was conventional so I thought that there would be little risk in having to deal with it by applying glyphosate and killing it off.  There must have been quite a bit of pollen drift from the RR corn that we bordered the field with as I've got a lot of volunteer corn to hoe out.  It'll be a good chance for me to take the girls up and put them work the next time they want to fight over whose American Girl doll is prettier.  I'll have to get some video of our bean walking experiences....as I'm sure they'll be good. 

On a personal note... my family was dealt a pretty big blow when my Grandma Smith passed away Saturday evening.  Grandma had always been a great supporter of mine and my pursuit of farming.  Even at the age of 92, she was always curious as to what was happening on the farm and was always quick with a story from her experiences throughout the years farming with my grandfather until his death in 1975.  As I visited with her over the last year and told her about what we were doing in changing to strip till, she was always a force of encouragement and told me to "go for it."  "Your grandfather wasn't ever afraid to take a chance and you shouldn't either,"  she would say.  I'm eternally grateful for her support and love over the years and hope that I can continue to "go for it."  She was a great lady with a tremendous spirit filled with kindness who will be missed by many!

Side dressing

June 2nd 2012

It's been really interesting to see progression of crop growth over the last 10 days since the high wind and erosion event.  There are a lot fields that got beat up and look rather ugly....especially soybean fields that were planted shallow or rolled as emergence is pretty poor.  We were lucky to get the rains that we received as our rootless corn has found some roots now that we have moisture and our soybeans were planted early and deep enough into moisture that our emergence has been really outstanding.  I'd say it's probably the best and most even our soybeans have ever looked planting into our strips.  Here's a shot of some of them around my house earlier this week.

Our late planted corn is coming along nicely and the stands look quite good considering it was still damp when we planted.  Dad spent the week getting a good look at the crop by getting all of our side dressing applications of nitrogen completed along with a little bit of spraying.  He has been pretty pleased driving across everything with the exception of the farm that we plowed where we had 30 acres sustain substantial damage from the wind erosion.  It is recovering though and will come back eventually albeit looking pretty tough for the foreseeable future.  Dad commented to me that he has never seen our corn look as even and with good color across the whole field including the hill tops where we strip tilled.  He really thinks having all of our fertilizer placed under the roots is paying off so far.  I think he's right.  I had one farm where I screwed up and didn't have the dry fertilizer on a few passes across the field I can see the difference in the color of the plants over the hill tops right to the row.  I'll have to try to get some pictures of this next week.  Sometimes those screw ups turn into good checks you can really learn from.

I was able to get to my strip inter crop last night and side dress some nitrogen on the corn.  I put 140 units of N across the strips as well as the block of normal planted corn with 28% treated with Instinct nitrogen stabilizer.  My plan is to come back in about 10 days before the rows shut and do my V pattern where I'll apply higher rates of 28% and ammonium thiosulfate on the outside rows and lower rates to the middle rows.  The strip inter crop corn without any nitrogen on corn on corn strip tilled looks unbelievable green so far.  I'm glad I was able to get the N on yesterday as I think my luck was about ready to run out on keeping the corn looking nice. 

Here's some video I shot while side dressing my nitrogen on with my employer's little JX80 case tractor with a 5 coulter side dress bar that we made for doing plot work.